The Jungle Chapter 31

One of the first things that Jurgis had done after he got a job
was to go and see Marija. She came down into the basement of the
house to meet him, and he stood by the door with his hat in his
hand, saying, "I've got work now, and so you can leave here."

But Marija only shook her head. There was nothing else for her
to do, she said, and nobody to employ her. She could not keep
her past a secret--girls had tried it, and they were always found
out. There were thousands of men who came to this place, and
sooner or later she would meet one of them. "And besides,"
Marija added, "I can't do anything. I'm no good--I take dope.
What could you do with me?"

"Can't you stop?" Jurgis cried.

"No," she answered, "I'll never stop. What's the use of talking
about it--I'll stay here till I die, I guess. It's all I'm fit
for." And that was all that he could get her to say--there was no
use trying. When he told her he would not let Elzbieta take her
money, she answered indifferently: "Then it'll be wasted
here--that's all." Her eyelids looked heavy and her face was red
and swollen; he saw that he was annoying her, that she only
wanted him to go away. So he went, disappointed and sad.

Poor Jurgis was not very happy in his home-life. Elzbieta was
sick a good deal now, and the boys were wild and unruly, and very
much the worse for their life upon the streets. But he stuck by
the family nevertheless, for they reminded him of his old
happiness; and when things went wrong he could solace himself
with a plunge into the Socialist movement. Since his life had
been caught up into the current of this great stream, things
which had before been the whole of life to him came to seem of
relatively slight importance; his interests were elsewhere,
in the world of ideas. His outward life was commonplace and
uninteresting; he was just a hotel-porter, and expected to remain
one while he lived; but meantime, in the realm of thought,
his life was a perpetual adventure. There was so much to know--so
many wonders to be discovered! Never in all his life did Jurgis
forget the day before election, when there came a telephone
message from a friend of Harry Adams, asking him to bring Jurgis
to see him that night; and Jurgis went, and met one of the minds
of the movement.

The invitation was from a man named Fisher, a Chicago millionaire
who had given up his life to settlement work, and had a little
home in the heart of the city's slums. He did not belong to the
party, but he was in sympathy with it; and he said that he was to
have as his guest that night the editor of a big Eastern
magazine, who wrote against Socialism, but really did not know
what it was. The millionaire suggested that Adams bring Jurgis
along, and then start up the subject of "pure food," in which the
editor was interested.

Young Fisher's home was a little two-story brick house, dingy and
weather-beaten outside, but attractive within. The room that
Jurgis saw was half lined with books, and upon the walls were
many pictures, dimly visible in the soft, yellow light; it was a
cold, rainy night, so a log fire was crackling in the open
hearth. Seven or eight people were gathered about it when Adams
and his friend arrived, and Jurgis saw to his dismay that three
of them were ladies. He had never talked to people of this sort
before, and he fell into an agony of embarrassment. He stood in
the doorway clutching his hat tightly in his hands, and made a
deep bow to each of the persons as he was introduced; then, when
he was asked to have a seat, he took a chair in a dark corner,
and sat down upon the edge of it, and wiped the perspiration off
his forehead with his sleeve. He was terrified lest they should
expect him to talk.

There was the host himself, a tall, athletic young man, clad in
evening dress, as also was the editor, a dyspeptic-looking
gentleman named Maynard. There was the former's frail young
wife, and also an elderly lady, who taught kindergarten in the
settlement, and a young college student, a beautiful girl with an
intense and earnest face. She only spoke once or twice while
Jurgis was there--the rest of the time she sat by the table in
the center of the room, resting her chin in her hands and
drinking in the conversation. There were two other men, whom
young Fisher had introduced to Jurgis as Mr. Lucas and Mr.
Schliemann; he heard them address Adams as "Comrade," and so he
knew that they were Socialists.

The one called Lucas was a mild and meek-looking little gentleman
of clerical aspect; he had been an itinerant evangelist, it
transpired, and had seen the light and become a prophet of the
new dispensation. He traveled all over the country, living like
the apostles of old, upon hospitality, and preaching upon street-
corners when there was no hall. The other man had been in the
midst of a discussion with the editor when Adams and Jurgis came
in; and at the suggestion of the host they resumed it after the
interruption. Jurgis was soon sitting spellbound, thinking that
here was surely the strangest man that had ever lived in the
world.

Nicholas Schliemann was a Swede, a tall, gaunt person, with hairy
hands and bristling yellow beard; he was a university man, and
had been a professor of philosophy--until, as he said, he had
found that he was selling his character as well as his time.
Instead he had come to America, where he lived in a garret room
in this slum district, and made volcanic energy take the place of
fire. He studied the composition of food-stuffs, and knew
exactly how many proteids and carbohydrates his body needed;
and by scientific chewing he said that he tripled the value
of all he ate, so that it cost him eleven cents a day. About the first of
July he would leave Chicago for his vacation, on foot; and when
he struck the harvest fields he would set to work for two dollars
and a half a day, and come home when he had another year's
supply--a hundred and twenty-five dollars. That was the nearest
approach to independence a man could make "under capitalism," he
explained; he would never marry, for no sane man would allow
himself to fall in love until after the revolution.

He sat in a big arm-chair, with his legs crossed, and his head so
far in the shadow that one saw only two glowing lights, reflected
from the fire on the hearth. He spoke simply, and utterly
without emotion; with the manner of a teacher setting forth to a
group of scholars an axiom in geometry, he would enunciate such
propositions as made the hair of an ordinary person rise on end.
And when the auditor had asserted his non-comprehension, he would
proceed to elucidate by some new proposition, yet more appalling.
To Jurgis the Herr Dr. Schliemann assumed the proportions of a
thunderstorm or an earthquake. And yet, strange as it might
seem, there was a subtle bond between them, and he could follow
the argument nearly all the time. He was carried over the
difficult places in spite of himself; and he went plunging away
in mad career--a very Mazeppa-ride upon the wild horse
Speculation.

Nicholas Schliemann was familiar with all the universe, and with
man as a small part of it. He understood human institutions, and
blew them about like soap bubbles. It was surprising that so
much destructiveness could be contained in one human mind. Was
it government? The purpose of government was the guarding of
property-rights, the perpetuation of ancient force and modern
fraud. Or was it marriage? Marriage and prostitution were two
sides of one shield, the predatory man's exploitation of the sex-
pleasure. The difference between them was a difference of class.
If a woman had money she might dictate her own terms: equality,
a life contract, and the legitimacy--that is, the property-rights--
of her children. If she had no money, she was a proletarian, and
sold herself for an existence. And then the subject became
Religion, which was the Archfiend's deadliest weapon. Government
oppressed the body of the wage-slave, but Religion oppressed his
mind, and poisoned the stream of progress at its source. The
working-man was to fix his hopes upon a future life, while his
pockets were picked in this one; he was brought up to frugality,
humility, obedience--in short to all the pseudo-virtues of
capitalism. The destiny of civilization would be decided in one
final death struggle between the Red International and the Black,
between Socialism and the Roman Catholic Church; while here at
home, "the stygian midnight of American evangelicalism--"

And here the ex-preacher entered the field, and there was a
lively tussle. "Comrade" Lucas was not what is called an
educated man; he knew only the Bible, but it was the Bible
interpreted by real experience. And what was the use, he asked,
of confusing Religion with men's perversions of it? That the
church was in the hands of the merchants at the moment was
obvious enough; but already there were signs of rebellion, and if
Comrade Schliemann could come back a few years from now--

"Ah, yes," said the other, "of course, I have no doubt that in a
hundred years the Vatican will be denying that it ever opposed
Socialism, just as at present it denies that it ever tortured
Galileo."

"I am not defending the Vatican," exclaimed Lucas, vehemently.
"I am defending the word of God--which is one long cry of the
human spirit for deliverance from the sway of oppression. Take
the twenty-fourth chapter of the Book of Job, which I am
accustomed to quote in my addresses as 'the Bible upon the Beef
Trust'; or take the words of Isaiah--or of the Master himself!
Not the elegant prince of our debauched and vicious art, not the
jeweled idol of our society churches--but the Jesus of the awful
reality, the man of sorrow and pain, the outcast, despised of the
world, who had nowhere to lay his head--"

"I will grant you Jesus," interrupted the other.

"Well, then," cried Lucas, "and why should Jesus have nothing to
do with his church--why should his words and his life be of no
authority among those who profess to adore him? Here is a man
who was the world's first revolutionist, the true founder of the
Socialist movement; a man whose whole being was one flame of
hatred for wealth, and all that wealth stands for,--for the pride
of wealth, and the luxury of wealth, and the tyranny of wealth;
who was himself a beggar and a tramp, a man of the people, an
associate of saloon-keepers and women of the town; who again and
again, in the most explicit language, denounced wealth and the
holding of wealth: 'Lay not up for yourselves treasures on
earth!'--'Sell that ye have and give alms!'--'Blessed are ye
poor, for yours is the kingdom of Heaven!'--'Woe unto you that
are rich, for ye have received your consolation!'--'Verily, I say
unto you, that a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of
Heaven!' Who denounced in unmeasured terms the exploiters of his
own time: 'Woe unto you, scribes and pharisees, hypocrites!'--
'Woe unto you also, you lawyers!'--'Ye serpents, ye generation of
vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?' Who drove out
the businessmen and brokers from the temple with a whip! Who was
crucified--think of it--for an incendiary and a disturber of the
social order! And this man they have made into the high priest
of property and smug respectability, a divine sanction of all the
horrors and abominations of modern commercial civilization!
Jeweled images are made of him, sensual priests burn incense to
him, and modern pirates of industry bring their dollars, wrung
from the toil of helpless women and children, and build temples
to him, and sit in cushioned seats and listen to his teachings
expounded by doctors of dusty divinity--"

"Bravo!" cried Schliemann, laughing. But the other was in full
career--he had talked this subject every day for five years, and
had never yet let himself be stopped. "This Jesus of Nazareth!"
he cried. "This class-conscious working-man! This union
carpenter! This agitator, law-breaker, firebrand, anarchist!
He, the sovereign lord and master of a world which grinds the
bodies and souls of human beings into dollars--if he could come
into the world this day and see the things that men have made in
his name, would it not blast his soul with horror? Would he not
go mad at the sight of it, he the Prince of Mercy and Love! That
dreadful night when he lay in the Garden of Gethsemane and
writhed in agony until he sweat blood--do you think that he saw
anything worse than he might see tonight upon the plains of
Manchuria, where men march out with a jeweled image of him before
them, to do wholesale murder for the benefit of foul monsters of
sensuality and cruelty? Do you not know that if he were in St.
Petersburg now, he would take the whip with which he drove out
the bankers from his temple--"

Here the speaker paused an instant for breath. "No, comrade,"
said the other, dryly, "for he was a practical man. He would
take pretty little imitation lemons, such as are now being
shipped into Russia, handy for carrying in the pockets, and
strong enough to blow a whole temple out of sight."

Lucas waited until the company had stopped laughing over this;
then he began again: "But look at it from the point of view of
practical politics, comrade. Here is an historical figure whom
all men reverence and love, whom some regard as divine; and who
was one of us--who lived our life, and taught our doctrine. And
now shall we leave him in the hands of his enemies--shall we
allow them to stifle and stultify his example? We have his
words, which no one can deny; and shall we not quote them to the
people, and prove to them what he was, and what he taught, and
what he did? No, no, a thousand times no!--we shall use his
authority to turn out the knaves and sluggards from his ministry,
and we shall yet rouse the people to action!--"

Lucas halted again; and the other stretched out his hand to a
paper on the table. "Here, comrade," he said, with a laugh,
"here is a place for you to begin. A bishop whose wife has just
been robbed of fifty thousand dollars' worth of diamonds! And a
most unctuous and oily of bishops! An eminent and scholarly
bishop! A philanthropist and friend of labor bishop--a Civic
Federation decoy duck for the chloroforming of the wage-working-
man!"

To this little passage of arms the rest of the company sat as
spectators. But now Mr. Maynard, the editor, took occasion to
remark, somewhat naively, that he had always understood that
Socialists had a cut-and-dried program for the future of
civilization; whereas here were two active members of the party,
who, from what he could make out, were agreed about nothing at
all. Would the two, for his enlightenment, try to ascertain just
what they had in common, and why they belonged to the same party?
This resulted, after much debating, in the formulating of two
carefully worded propositions: First, that a Socialist believes
in the common ownership and democratic management of the means of
producing the necessities of life; and, second, that a Socialist
believes that the means by which this is to be brought about is
the class conscious political organization of the wage-earners.
Thus far they were at one; but no farther. To Lucas, the
religious zealot, the co-operative commonwealth was the New
Jerusalem, the kingdom of Heaven, which is "within you." To the
other, Socialism was simply a necessary step toward a far-distant
goal, a step to be tolerated with impatience. Schliemann called
himself a "philosophic anarchist"; and he explained that an
anarchist was one who believed that the end of human existence
was the free development of every personality, unrestricted by
laws save those of its own being. Since the same kind of match
would light every one's fire and the same-shaped loaf of bread
would fill every one's stomach, it would be perfectly feasible to
submit industry to the control of a majority vote. There was
only one earth, and the quantity of material things was limited.
Of intellectual and moral things, on the other hand, there was no
limit, and one could have more without another's having less;
hence "Communism in material production, anarchism in
intellectual," was the formula of modern proletarian thought.
As soon as the birth agony was over, and the wounds of society had
been healed, there would be established a simple system whereby
each man was credited with his labor and debited with his
purchases; and after that the processes of production, exchange,
and consumption would go on automatically, and without our being
conscious of them, any more than a man is conscious of the
beating of his heart. And then, explained Schliemann, society
would break up into independent, self-governing communities of
mutually congenial persons; examples of which at present were
clubs, churches, and political parties. After the revolution,
all the intellectual, artistic, and spiritual activities of men
would be cared for by such "free associations"; romantic
novelists would be supported by those who liked to read romantic
novels, and impressionist painters would be supported by those
who liked to look at impressionist pictures--and the same with
preachers and scientists, editors and actors and musicians. If
any one wanted to work or paint or pray, and could find no one to
maintain him, he could support himself by working part of the
time. That was the case at present, the only difference being
that the competitive wage system compelled a man to work all the
time to live, while, after the abolition of privilege and
exploitation, any one would be able to support himself by an
hour's work a day. Also the artist's audience of the present was
a small minority of people, all debased and vulgarized by the
effort it had cost them to win in the commercial battle, of the
intellectual and artistic activities which would result when the
whole of mankind was set free from the nightmare of competition,
we could at present form no conception whatever.

And then the editor wanted to know upon what ground Dr.
Schliemann asserted that it might be possible for a society to
exist upon an hour's toil by each of its members. "Just what,"
answered the other, "would be the productive capacity of society
if the present resources of science were utilized, we have no
means of ascertaining; but we may be sure it would exceed
anything that would sound reasonable to minds inured to the
ferocious barbarities of capitalism. After the triumph of the
international proletariat, war would of course be inconceivable;
and who can figure the cost of war to humanity--not merely the
value of the lives and the material that it destroys, not merely
the cost of keeping millions of men in idleness, of arming and
equipping them for battle and parade, but the drain upon the
vital energies of society by the war attitude and the war terror,
the brutality and ignorance, the drunkenness, prostitution, and
crime it entails, the industrial impotence and the moral
deadness? Do you think that it would be too much to say that two
hours of the working time of every efficient member of a
community goes to feed the red fiend of war?"

And then Schliemann went on to outline some of the wastes of
competition: the losses of industrial warfare; the ceaseless
worry and friction; the vices--such as drink, for instance, the
use of which had nearly doubled in twenty years, as a consequence
of the intensification of the economic struggle; the idle and
unproductive members of the community, the frivolous rich and the
pauperized poor; the law and the whole machinery of repression;
the wastes of social ostentation, the milliners and tailors, the
hairdressers, dancing masters, chefs and lackeys. "You
understand," he said, "that in a society dominated by the fact of
commercial competition, money is necessarily the test of prowess,
and wastefulness the sole criterion of power. So we have, at the
present moment, a society with, say, thirty per cent of the
population occupied in producing useless articles, and one per
cent occupied in destroying them. And this is not all; for the
servants and panders of the parasites are also parasites, the
milliners and the jewelers and the lackeys have also to be
supported by the useful members of the community. And bear in
mind also that this monstrous disease affects not merely the
idlers and their menials, its poison penetrates the whole social
body. Beneath the hundred thousand women of the elite are a
million middle-class women, miserable because they are not of the
elite, and trying to appear of it in public; and beneath them,
in turn, are five million farmers' wives reading 'fashion papers'
and trimming bonnets, and shop-girls and serving-maids selling
themselves into brothels for cheap jewelry and imitation seal-
skin robes. And then consider that, added to this competition in
display, you have, like oil on the flames, a whole system of
competition in selling! You have manufacturers contriving tens
of thousands of catchpenny devices, storekeepers displaying them,
and newspapers and magazines filled up with advertisements of
them!"

"And don't forget the wastes of fraud," put in young Fisher.

"When one comes to the ultra-modern profession of advertising,"
responded Schliemann--"the science of persuading people to buy
what they do not want--he is in the very center of the ghastly
charnel house of capitalist destructiveness, and he scarcely
knows which of a dozen horrors to point out first. But consider
the waste in time and energy incidental to making ten thousand
varieties of a thing for purposes of ostentation and
snobbishness, where one variety would do for use! Consider all
the waste incidental to the manufacture of cheap qualities of
goods, of goods made to sell and deceive the ignorant; consider
the wastes of adulteration,--the shoddy clothing, the cotton
blankets, the unstable tenements, the ground-cork life-
preservers, the adulterated milk, the aniline soda water, the
potato-flour sausages--"

"And consider the moral aspects of the thing," put in the
ex-preacher.

"Precisely," said Schliemann; "the low knavery and the ferocious
cruelty incidental to them, the plotting and the lying and the
bribing, the blustering and bragging, the screaming egotism, the
hurrying and worrying. Of course, imitation and adulteration are
the essence of competition--they are but another form of the
phrase 'to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest.'
A government official has stated that the nation suffers a loss of
a billion and a quarter dollars a year through adulterated foods;
which means, of course, not only materials wasted that might have
been useful outside of the human stomach, but doctors and nurses
for people who would otherwise have been well, and undertakers
for the whole human race ten or twenty years before the proper
time. Then again, consider the waste of time and energy required
to sell these things in a dozen stores, where one would do.
There are a million or two of business firms in the country,
and five or ten times as many clerks; and consider the handling and
rehandling, the accounting and reaccounting, the planning and
worrying, the balancing of petty profit and loss. Consider the
whole machinery of the civil law made necessary by these
processes; the libraries of ponderous tomes, the courts and
juries to interpret them, the lawyers studying to circumvent
them, the pettifogging and chicanery, the hatreds and lies!
Consider the wastes incidental to the blind and haphazard
production of commodities--the factories closed, the workers
idle, the goods spoiling in storage; consider the activities of
the stock manipulator, the paralyzing of whole industries, the
overstimulation of others, for speculative purposes; the
assignments and bank failures, the crises and panics, the
deserted towns and the starving populations! Consider the
energies wasted in the seeking of markets, the sterile trades,
such as drummer, solicitor, bill-poster, advertising agent.
Consider the wastes incidental to the crowding into cities, made
necessary by competition and by monopoly railroad rates; consider
the slums, the bad air, the disease and the waste of vital
energies; consider the office buildings, the waste of time and
material in the piling of story upon story, and the burrowing
underground! Then take the whole business of insurance, the
enormous mass of administrative and clerical labor it involves,
and all utter waste--"

"I do not follow that," said the editor. "The Cooperative
Commonwealth is a universal automatic insurance company and
savings bank for all its members. Capital being the property of
all, injury to it is shared by all and made up by all. The bank
is the universal government credit-account, the ledger in which
every individual's earnings and spendings ate balanced. There is
also a universal government bulletin, in which are listed and
precisely described everything which the commonwealth has for
sale. As no one makes any profit by the sale, there is no longer
any stimulus to extravagance, and no misrepresentation; no
cheating, no adulteration or imitation, no bribery or
'grafting.'"

"How is the price of an article determined?"

"The price is the labor it has cost to make and deliver it, and
it is determined by the first principles of arithmetic. The
million workers in the nation's wheat fields have worked a
hundred days each, and the total product of the labor is a
billion bushels, so the value of a bushel of wheat is the tenth
part of a farm labor-day. If we employ an arbitrary symbol, and
pay, say, five dollars a day for farm work, then the cost of a
bushel of wheat is fifty cents."

"You say 'for farm work,'" said Mr. Maynard. "Then labor is not
to be paid alike?"

"Manifestly not, since some work is easy and some hard, and we
should have millions of rural mail carriers, and no coal miners.
Of course the wages may be left the same, and the hours varied;
one or the other will have to be varied continually, according as
a greater or less number of workers is needed in any particular
industry. That is precisely what is done at present, except that
the transfer of the workers is accomplished blindly and
imperfectly, by rumors and advertisements, instead of instantly
and completely, by a universal government bulletin."

"How about those occupations in which time is difficult to
calculate? What is the labor cost of a book?"

"Obviously it is the labor cost of the paper, printing, and
binding of it--about a fifth of its present cost."

"And the author?"

"I have already said that the state could not control
intellectual production. The state might say that it had taken a
year to write the book, and the author might say it had taken
thirty. Goethe said that every bon mot of his had cost a purse
of gold. What I outline here is a national, or rather
international, system for the providing of the material needs of
men. Since a man has intellectual needs also, he will work
longer, earn more, and provide for them to his own taste and in
his own way. I live on the same earth as the majority, I wear
the same kind of shoes and sleep in the same kind of bed; but I
do not think the same kind of thoughts, and I do not wish to pay
for such thinkers as the majority selects. I wish such things to
be left to free effort, as at present. If people want to listen
to a certain preacher, they get together and contribute what they
please, and pay for a church and support the preacher, and then
listen to him; I, who do not want to listen to him, stay away,
and it costs me nothing. In the same way there are magazines
about Egyptian coins, and Catholic saints, and flying machines,
and athletic records, and I know nothing about any of them. On
the other hand, if wage slavery were abolished, and I could earn
some spare money without paying tribute to an exploiting
capitalist, then there would be a magazine for the purpose of
interpreting and popularizing the gospel of Friedrich Nietzsche,
the prophet of Evolution, and also of Horace Fletcher, the
inventor of the noble science of clean eating; and incidentally,
perhaps, for the discouraging of long skirts, and the scientific
breeding of men and women, and the establishing of divorce by
mutual consent."

Dr. Schliemann paused for a moment. "That was a lecture," he
said with a laugh, "and yet I am only begun!"